Monday, September 28, 2009

Sorry it's been a while since my last post. Not much going on around here that I thought was blog worthy. Red and Scout are eating grass like crazy out in the pasture. We wormed them hoping, maybe, that they would start filling out more. Scout is doing much better. He has more energy and is running all over like he is a race horse. Red is taking some time. He is 21yrs old. I hope he can pull out of it. He is the sweetest thing. He loves people.

This last weekend Hubby has been working on the house. It's getting closer and closer to moving into. I told him I will move in as soon as the electric is on. I don't care if it doesn't have drywall on the walls, or that it doesn't have flooring down. I want in my house. lol. We can use bed sheets for walls, and area rugs for the floors. I would really like to get out of "The Shack" before it gets really cold outside.

Apples are ripening around the area. As soon as we get a little money back, I want to get a few bushels from the local orchard and make apple butter. Hubby has already ate all of the peach butter. For a man who doesn't like peaches, he sure put a hurtin' on the peach butter. lol. Since complaining of how tired I was of canning veggies from the garden, I can hardly wait to can apples. lol. No wonder men say they don't understand women.

Oh, by the way, IT'S COLD AROUND HERE!!!!! We had a cold front come through early this morning. It's cold and it's very windy. The meteorologist say we will be lucky to get out of the 50's in the next few days. And, we may even see a light frost one night this week. WOW! Time sure does fly by. It seems just like yesterday I was trying to figure how much to plant in the garden. Soon it will be( I dare to say it) Christmas. I'm thinking about giving homemade gifts this year. (Hey Lil Sis, you can make some suggestions here. lol)

Well, I guess I'll blog later. Sometimes things that are mundane to us,may be very interesting to others. So as boring as I might think it is around here, I'll try to keep you guys up to date. lol. If you have any questions to ask me, feel free. I'll try to answer them all. (Please no boxers or briefs questions. You really don't want me to answer that. lol)

Monday, September 21, 2009

Me and Hubby went to a chili festival this weekend and look what we saw. Isn't that the cutest thing?

They had a few horses and ponies pulling carts of people around the streets of Huntington. One street over, there were thousands(okay,maybe not thousands) of people cooking chili. You buy a cup of chili for a dollar and all of the money goes to the Ronald McDonald House. That's a great charity. My cousin had to use it when his new born was in the hospital for a few weeks. That was a few years ago, and the baby is fine now. But, he wouldn't have been able to stay with his child if it wasn't for the Ronald McDonald House. They provided a place for him to stay.

Anyway, me and Hubby had a nice time there. Until it got too crowded. And, boy, it got crowded. So we went home to where we could breathe. lol. Here's another picture of some of the horses.

We had a few people needing more details about the horses that we are trying to fatten up. We took the pictures of Red and Scout at our house. We have plenty of grass for them here. The place that they were at WAS over 100 acres, but, it was all hills and trees. No grass. There was just a little bit of grass around the ponds and down on a small flat by the road.

This is what the horses look like that have been kept at our house.

Fat!!!!! Or are they expecting? We had one of our neighbors stud horse break out of his fence. It wasn't hard for him to break out. It was an electric fence that they had turned off 3 days before. Okay, let me explain to you if you don't know anything about horses. Stud horses(stallions) "laugh" at electric fences if there are mares around. Especially, if that electric fence has been turned off for 3 days.

Anyway, their stud horse came up and visited our mares, at 4:00am in the morning, back in November of last year. He didn't get into the fence, but it is just a barb wire fence. One strand was broke. It snagged Hubby's mare's leg and made a huge gash on it. We had to doctor it for a while. Once again, I was not a happy camper. The neighbor that I'm talking about, is not the good neighbor moving in across from us. It's a neighbor that moved in down the road from us a few years ago.

Here's a picture of the mare in question. Now, she is fat, I know. But is it baby or not? Only time will tell. If she is, can you get child support for a colt?

Yes I know about the flies, we have fixed them. I also know about the fence being loose. We have fixed it too. Please, no bad comments. All has been taken care of.lol.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

We have horses. We have three horses. Two mares and a young gelding. The gelding is from one of our mares. So, when he became 6 months old, we weaned him. We took him to Hubby's dad's house. Hubby's dad has an older gelding,named Red,(original huh) that we thought would get along with Scout, our young gelding. Anyway, Hubby's dad took Scout and Red to a place where he has 3 other horses. A few hundred acres on a few hills. You would think a horses dream. Land to run on, with no humans.

These horses have been there for a while. Scout is now 2 1/2 years old. We worked with him before we put him on the hill so he would be easy to catch and lead. We thought these horses were being taken care of. We are going to break Scout to ride soon, so we decided to go and check on the horses. Imagine our horror when we saw this....

This is Red. He was a show horse. When he left our farm 2 1/2 years ago, he was so fat he could have stood to lose about 100 pounds. We is an old style Tennessee Walker. He is suppose to have large round hind quarters and a thick chest and neck. He sure doesn't have it now. This horse was starving to death. These pictures don't show how thin he really is. I plan on getting better pictures to post on here later.

And Scout,(once again you can't hardly tell in this picture)he has lost a lot of weight too. With him being a younger horse,he was in better shape than Red. But, He can still stand to put on at least 50 pounds.

Right now, I'm mad. I'm mad that anyone could let horses get in this bad of shape. We thought that Hubby's dad was taking care of them. Guess not. Looks like me and Hubby have two projects on our hands. It's a good thing we saw them and brought them home before it got worse.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Okay, my last post I talked about just eating locally. As I got to studying the things in my pantry, I realize this is going to take a little bit of planning and organizing. So, maybe I should have said that we are going to try HARDER to eat locally.lol. I want to be able to grow everything we need and eat here on the farm. But, it's not going to happen over night. I realize that now. One day and one purchase at a time. Me and Hubby were discussing how much we actually did this year towards our goal. We canned and froze quite a bit of food. More than we did the year before.(Which was hardly anything) Next year, we will do even more. As much as I wanted to, I couldn't just snap my fingers and it would all happen at once. Although, wouldn't that be nice?

Another thing I learned was, if you are making your own food from your pantry, you have to plan more. You can't just pop an 11 pound ham into the microwave after you get off work. It doesn't work that way. Although, once again, it would be nice. So I found out that one of the things that I have to learn is meal planning. I thought I was good at that. WRONG! Hotdogs don't count when it comes to planning good local and nutritional foods to eat.

So, I'm taking back the things I said in my last post. (at least some of it) There are guide lines that we want to go by, (like eat local, organic, not genetically modified, and eat our own food that WE grow.)but it's going to take a little longer to get where we want. But you have admit, we are closer than when we started.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

A few people wanted to see our new house we are building(and when I say we, I mean my Hubby). Well, here is one side. We don't know if we should call this the front because this is the side of our driveway. This is going to be where everyone enters.

Here's a side view(kinda). We plan on building a celler there one day. It's going to be to the right of the house. Just put it on the list.

This is the side that points to the road. (If you can see it around the horse and trees).Sorry it's so fuzzy. I was on the back of a four wheeler when I took it.

Yesterday me and Hubby went to a local festival. I just love festivals. I would rather go to a festival than a fair anyday. I don't know if it's the actual festival verses fair thing, or if it's a fall verses summer thing. Festivals remind me of fall, and pumpkins, and frosty mornings. Oh, it can't get much better.

Now on to another subject:

There is something me and Hubby are trying to do now. We are going to try and eat locally. First, we want to NOT go to the grocery store so often. We would go at least once a week, spend close to a hundred dollars, and still not have anything good to eat at home.We also went OUT to eat a lot. (could explain the weight problem lol.) Eating locally HAS to be better for you. The food has to be fresher and therefore better for you. And when I say locally, I don't mean a local restarant. lol. We are going to grow a lot of our food. What we can't grow we are going to try and get locally. What we can't get locally, I guess we will try to do without.

I have been looking into genetically modified foods. SCARY!!!!! It makes a person not want to eat ANYTHING! Once again, another reason to raise your own foods. If you haven't looked into these foods, please do so. The more people know about them, the better off we will be.

I didn't want this to be a preachy post, but, I have just started getting info about this myself lately. I have never heard about all of these things, but it now makes me think more about my food. I guess that's a good thing.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

So far this has been a busy weekend. Me and Hubby went to the Amish country, that is only about an hour away from our house, yesterday. We have never visited that part of the Amish community. All the things that we have ever heard about the Amish, were about the ones in northern Ohio. That's about a 5 hour drive for us. I could have kicked myself. They have just about the same thing here as they have up there. It's just not as commercialized. Which to me, is a good thing. Their stuff is still expensive though. The whole "bulk food" stores puzzle me. Aren't they suppose to be cheaper? Well, not the ones that I seen. They were MORE expensive. But, their stores were still full of non-Amish people. Do people think that since it's Amish that it's suppose to be better? Sorry, I thought M&Ms are the same anywhere you get them. Especially when they have the "M" on them. I don't know maybe I'm being too picky, but I don't think enriched flour should be over a $1 a pound. Anyway, we still had a good time. We like driving around and "exploring."

Today, we went to Hubby's family reunion. It was held at a relatives house that lived on the Ohio River. It was beautiful. I love watching that water. You see so many different things on the river. Different boats, different birds, and different barges go up and down the river all day long. I'll post some of the pictures I took later on. Anyway, we had a really nice time. We met relatives that we didn't know. Plus we got a new place to fish on the river. lol. We know there are fish there, we saw them jumping in the water.

So after the fun weekend, the holiday is going to be a "work" day for us. I can't stand not getting anything done around the house. Hubby and his dad are going to be working on the new house tomorrow. He's working on the wiring. We are soooooo close to moving in. I told him as soon as he gets electric down there, I'm moving in. I don't care if I have to use old sheets as walls. I want in my new house before our old one falls down around our heads. I'm getting excited.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Hubby didn't get the job. It must not have been meant to be. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Must not dwell on it, move forward.

Do any of you out there in Blog Land live on a dirt road? Sure it's nice not to have that much traffic speeding by. But to live on a dirt road you get this...

Me and Hubby went to a car show with our own car looking like this.(Our car was not in the show.) As we were there, a small child decided our car need washed.(I don't know where they got that idea.) So they proceded to "wash" our car for us. If you look real close, you will see the "wash job" they did for us. lol. We didn't notice it until we came home that night. Well I guess the little "washer" saw everyone else cleaning dust off of their cars. They just didn't want to be left out. lol. Oh well, I guess we will have to wash our car. But after our first trip home, it will look just like this again.

Thank's to everyone who wished Hubby luck. It's nice to know you care.

Oh and Katie, the picture at the top of my blog, is in Amish country. Me and Hubby went to Ohio's Amish country for our 10th year anniversary. Funny though, we do have Amish that live about one hour away from us. But, we went 6 hours away so we could see THOSE Amish. I know doesn't make much since, but we don't always do things that make sence. lol

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Look what went over our house a few days ago. It was so low it shook the house windows. It also spooked the horses and cattle. We have had them come over before, but never that low. You could see the guns on the front of it and everything. Kinda scary huh?

Okay, now for the news......(drum roll please) Hubby has a job interview tomorrow!!!!!!YEA!!!!!!!! He filled out an application on line last night. They called him this morning. That was fast! I hope that's a good sign. He has been laid off for 9 months.(I didn't realize it had been that long until I just now added it up.) We wont know what to do with a normal sized paycheck. I'm sure I'll find something though. lol. Now, if Hubby gets this job, we might actually get to SAVE money instead of living from paycheck to paycheck. How weird will that be? So all of you out in Blog Land,please pray, cross your fingers, wish him luck, knock on wood,or do a little job dance. lol. But we both have decided, if it is meant for him to have this job, he will get it.

About Me

I grew up on 2 acres of land north of Columbus OH. Mom had a small garden,I had a horse,and Dad had his tractor, but we were far from what you would call homesteaders. It wasn't until I moved to Kentucky and married my husband did I start to have a small interest in growing a garden again. We have a few head of cattle, a small herd of horses, a flock of chickens and 2 dogs. And the garden, it keeps growing and growing each year. We decided we want to be more self-reliant. I don't know much about homesteading, but I'm willing to learn as I go. Oh, this could get good.